


Clasping White Chrysanthemums

by feudal



Category: Gintama
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 15:01:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1230811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feudal/pseuds/feudal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He always thought of her hands as beautiful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clasping White Chrysanthemums

He always thought of her hands as beautiful.

Strange, that. They were all dirt-poor back then; calling them working-class would have been too generous. While he and the others honed their swordsmanship endlessly, the whoosh of their practice swings reverberating throughout the shabby yet hallowed halls of the dojo for hours at a time, she always had her head down while theirs faced forward. Her hands deftly maneuvered the both cleaning cloth and the sewing needle, fixing everything that ought to be fixed—broken things, broken people.

He still remembers the way her hands were clenched into fists when she confessed, her fingernails etching miniature crescents into her palms as nervousness came over her in waves. As much as he might have wanted to take those hands into his own, to comfort her as she ought to have been comforted, there was no possible way he could. His were too stained with blood to be worthy of touching hers.

“Mitsuba-dono!! You’ll make yourself sick if you put that much hot sauce into your soup!” Kondou-san had cried out in alarm, looking on almost helplessly as Mitsuba proceeded to drain the hot sauce bottle of its contents.

“Spicy food is healthy! It gets your blood pumping, didn’t you know?”

“Toshiiiiiii!!” Similar panic arose in Kondou-san when Hijikata squeezed an entire bottle of mayonnaise into his own bowl. He and Mitsuba exchanged glances, then smiles at their shared joke. They were heart-to-heart comrades, both holding strongly onto a love of the bizarre tastes that others could not ever possibly understand. To him her tastes were perfectly natural and to her, likewise.

Just once, Hijikata had rushed to pick something up in town and he’d passed by the house where Mitsuba worked as a servant. Through the cracks in the bamboo fence, he saw her. She knelt on the ground facing the earth, her head lowered in shame as she wrung her beautiful hands in her lap.

No man ever wanted to see the woman he loved so humbled.

“Please don’t tell Sougo,” she would tell him afterwards, his awkward behavior communicating clearly that he’d seen and could not comprehend. “That child... He’d be upset if he knew.”

“Is it really okay? ...To go on like that...” Hijikata wanted to say, but he knew that there was no other choice. The Okita siblings had lost their parents long ago. Kondou took good care of Sougo, but Mitsuba had to have her own way of life. One day they would all have to part.

“It was my own fault, staining the mistress’s silk like that.” Mitsuba laughed, covering her mouth to hide her shame.

Staining? “Hey—”

“Oh, that’s right! Hijikata-san, are you going to the festival tonight?” she interrupted before he could voice any of his concerns. Years later, he would wish that he had voiced them anyway, but the moment had passed. He would learn of the red bloodstains upon that immaculate white silk—the meaning of her gestures that day—all too late.

“Ah... No, err... I wasn’t planning on it.” Why was he always so tongue-tied in her presence alone? It was one of the biggest sources of annoyance in his life.

“Hmm... I’d hate to impose, but I wanted to go and the friend I was planning on going with had some plans she couldn’t avoid. I wonder why she suddenly had to leave after I said I wanted to visit the all-you-can-eat chili booth!”

Hijikata had a notion of why, but wisely said nothing. “If you really wanna go that bad, I’ll go with you. Kondou-san’s canceling practice tonight, anyway.”

“Really?! That’s great! Thank you so much, Hijikata-san!”

Hijikata reddened at the sight of her ecstatic expression. He could not meet her gaze and turned away slightly. “I-it’s just a festival... No big deal...”

One of the other sources of annoyance in Hijikata’s life was the awful timing that life seemed to always throw at him.

“I’m so sorry... I’m the one who asked you to go with me and now we can’t go...”

“It can’t be helped, right? The brat—I mean, with senpai getting sick and all.” Hijikata sighed, scratching his head. From underneath his blanket, Sougo glared at him.

“Don’t make it sound like it’s my fault, Hijikata-san. You’re such a brute!” Sougo snapped between coughs.

“Now, now, Sougo... Don’t be like that.” Mitsuba frowned a little as she gently stroked her brother’s head to soothe him. She smiled at Hijikata over him, oblivious to her brother’s resentment.

Sougo eventually fell asleep and Hijikata couldn’t quite find a reason to leave, so he remained. There was a strange gulf between him and Mitsuba that couldn’t be crossed and so they sat in companionable silence for a time, watching the distant fireworks blossom in the night sky.

“I do wish we’d gotten to go to that all-you-can-eat chili booth...”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your favorite thing about festivals, Hijikata-san?”

“Dunno.”

“I wonder if there’s lots of people there tonight.”

“Hmm.”

In the face of his monosyllables, Mitsuba steadfastly went on. Perhaps she understood his lack of eloquence, perhaps not. Mitsuba was the paragon of patience. Hijikata wondered if she would wait forever for him to initiate a conversation.

“If there was...a special mayonnaise booth... It would’ve been nice, I guess.” he finally said, coughing into a balled fist in an attempt to look as nonchalant as possible.

“Ooh, maybe with spicy mayonnaise! Then we could both enjoy~”

“You really like spicy food, huh?”

“Yep! I love them!”

Hijikata turned away, the word “love” being too overwhelming for him to hear. Mitsuba’s radiantly face was too much for him. Her existence itself was too much for him. Up until the day the Shinsengumi left for Edo, he continued to turn away from her. It acutely pained him to realize that it got easier and easier to do so the more he did it.

“Please be happy.” he thought as he and the other men left her behind. “Even if I’m not by your side, I...” He should have been happy that the last time he saw her, she was smiling. Instead, the feeling he had was like a coiled, thorny vine in his chest—always constricting, always reminding.

On the day of the wake, she was laid out on a bed of white chrysanthemums. They were almost the same color as her hands, clasped over her chest as if she were in prayer. Hijikata felt that those flowers ill-suited her, but there was nothing he could say.

Despite being in death’s repose, her hands were still as lovely as ever. He wondered what they had bourne over the years that he hadn’t seen her. It was far too late to know now. All the things he’d never told her scattered to the wind like the ashes and dust.

“Even if you’re not by my side, I...”


End file.
